Nvidia, GPP and The Gaming Community

It’s no surprise once again that Nvidia, makers of some of the finest technology humanity has come to invent is yet again finding itself in more hot water because they just can’t get enough press apparently. It’s not enough being the top seller of graphics cards, it’s not enough having the highest market share. Oh no, Nvidia has to go after their own partners for not allowing them to have a monopoly on what seems like branding.

Branding

Yes, branding that thing that comes on the side of your graphics card. The bit that says ROG, Gaming or SuperMegaCard.exe, the thing these partners (Asus, MSI, EVGA, etc) pour millions into, to set them out from the rest. Nvidia wants to take that brand and “Seize the means of production” on it. Basically, and this is what GPP states, you can’t use that brand with an AMD card for example. So before you’d have the ROG RX 580 with all the flashy lighting. No more! Nvidia said all that effort you put in marketing two cards, now you can put it all into one! The competitor? Nah they don’t matter, they don’t have as much volume as us. It’s absolutely absurd to me that Nvidia is flexing to get brands to pull their marketing for a competitor. Surely that has to ring some alarm bells somewhere in the world?

Community

The community reaction has been nothing but well mediocre to say the least. You’ve got a private company making a massive move against the industry here and the most everyone is bothering about is whether the prices are going to come down so they can keep buying their products. There’s a simple solution to this. Boycott Nvidia and stop supporting these practices.

Is it really a big deal if you can’t play the latest and greatest title on ultra at 87 fps when the AMD Card will do it at like 79? Is it really that big of a deal? I get that you want every bit of performance for your dollar but, sometimes you have to look at the industry and say… yes. I’m taking a stand, enough is enough. Otherwise you’re saying I have no problem with a monopoly, everything costing more and my general ability as a consumer to choose being lost. I’ve always had the comeback to this being, “But what if I want to choose a NVidia GPU, you saying all of this is stopping my choice from going through”. I’m not trying to stop you buying a NVidia GPU. I just want you to be informed enough to be okay with what is being proposed. It’s healthy to have a balance of two products battling against each other. No one loses if AMD leaves the market.

For too long gamers have just accepted whatever a company says to them as final:

Now, here’s the thing, some of the articles I’ve linked might actually contradict my point, in that they show people rising up and fighting back the system. But did they? The games still sold millions, they might have had a 20 odd reddit posts saying NEVER AGAIN, but do we need to reference that famous image for the 498th time on the internet?

At the end of the day I think it really shows the true nature of the gaming community. People just don’t care.

And that is where it comes back to our full circle. Back to NVidia’s GPP. You see it isn’t all that different. People are ignoring issues for a few more FPS. When all they really have to do is support the competition for a few generations and watch their products improve just as NVidas has. Money talks at the end of the day, if they don’t have the money then don’t be surprised when you don’t have a choice.

Conclusion

Gamers in general want no drama. They want to sit down, play their games and not have to deal with any issues in that game or surrounding it. The thing is that isn’t possible in today’s world. You have a moral choice to pick, a choice to pick for the industry and about 1,400 bloggers just like me telling you why you should be shot out of a canon for X, Y and Z reason. We wouldn’t have to have these conversions if people simply put stop defending multi-billion dollar companies, and stopped acting like their life will end if they don’t have the latest star wars game or the latest Call of Duty and instead just waited. Wait, see if the games good, gauge community reaction, is the bug list currently standing worth the buy? Are you happy with a £54.99 price tag for games? Are you happy with the publisher? It’s a lot to decide on, and there’s plenty more to decide on after all of this. The real question is, do you want to? Do you care if Nvidia was the only GPU maker, do you care if Ubisoft made the same game every single year? Do you care if Microsoft was the only operating system developer left, what about Rockstar and it’s love for GTA Online? Would you prefer it to go back to the single player roots?

Everyone has a voice. You have a voice. A company shouldn’t decide that and I shouldn’t either. All I can hope is that this somewhat made you think about what you want in the future. I’m not telling you to go out and buy all of AMDs stock. I’m saying, think about it.